Barry Sonnenfeld: Call Your Mother

I started to read the book with a feeling that it would be a ride through a director that I admire memory and history.  As from some of the other reviews that I have glanced at have said.  

What I didn’t expect was a description of a neurotic survivor who was surrounded as he grew up of completely dysfunctional and otherwise neurotic people who happened to be family members and friends.  

This is a very funny book if you are prepared to read about some serious dysfunction.  It’s very touching and also really sometimes difficult to read. If you get past the difficult passages you will literally laugh aloud. 

Some of my favorite passages are those where Barry Sonnenfeld talks about himself and recognizes how neurotic he is and explains why.  Most of the book is riffing on this.  Hey if you can’t make fun of yourself who can you make fun of is the saying right?

As I was thinking about what I was going to write, I realized how hard it is to write a review of a book that really is pretty painful to read some of the time, but, you know really does end up ok… and has a great martini recipe?  What is my take on this?  I was honestly thinking that I don’t like to give away too much about myself but I do find myself wanting to make fun of my personal neurosis.  I was driving to an appointment, thinking I would rather be going anywhere else I heard an interview on the radio and honestly… this helped me decide to put the book down for a couple of weeks and marinate in what I wanted to get out of it.

 At first I thought I was going to get insight into a filmmaker’s background and business. Nope it really is a collection of anecdotes, very well documented anecdotes about overcoming weird situations with a sense of neurosis and humor and a deep delve into a human's mind. That was the gift of this book.  There it is.  I went in thinking one thing was going to happen and through empathy and reading through a bit of laughter was the gift of understanding someone else's tragedies can bring everyone some joy in a roundabout way.   

 In this book… Barry Sonnenfeld overcomes some of the following…..and I am giving nothing away here… parents that are less than ideal by yesteryears standards or todays for that matter, a horrible cousin, his college shutting down, living in the woods, porn, kidney stones, making films and falling in love (and other maladies).  Normally no one would want to read about these things. But Barry Sonnenfeld has written a first person memoir that takes you to these places and honestly you kinda are glad that he takes you there.

He is very self-effacing and has an incredible sense of humor about what terrible things he has overcome.  I was cheering for him and all his successes as we went along. 

If you can find (and you should) the press that Mr. Sonnenfeld has done for this book, honestly and candidly his talking about it is so much … so much… better than my review ever could be.  Just know that I really did enjoy it. I wanted to gag a little at some of his descriptions but knowing that he probably did a little as he wrote them makes me feel better. I felt like he was telling me a story across a kitchen table.  It was weirdly a joy to read.  As I imagine it was a weird joy for him to write.